Valley of the Kings Tours & Tickets

Nothing above ground prepares you for the Valley of the Kings. From the road it is a barren desert wadi behind the Theban cliffs, all glare and scree, watched over by a pyramid-shaped peak called al-Qurn. The treasure is entirely underground: 63 known tombs cut deep into the rock, the burial places of Egypt's New Kingdom pharaohs, their corridors painted with funerary texts in colours so fresh they look weeks old rather than three thousand years.

That contrast is the whole experience. You walk down a ramp out of blinding sunlight into cool, dim corridors where a sky goddess arches across the ceiling in blue and gold, gods take kings by the hand, and every surface carries the spells meant to steer a dead pharaoh through the night toward sunrise. No museum reproduces the feeling of standing inside a decorated royal tomb, and here you can do it several times in one morning.

The practical shape of a visit is worth understanding before you go. The standard ticket admits you to any three tombs from the list open that day, and a few celebrated tombs, Tutankhamun, Seti I and Ramesses V/VI among them, carry their own separate tickets on top. Arrive when the gates open at 6am, pick your tombs with a little strategy, and the valley will hand you one of the best mornings in Egypt.

Why the pharaohs went underground

For centuries Egyptian kings had built pyramids, and the pyramids had one fatal flaw: they told every robber in the country exactly where the gold was. Around 1500 BC the kings of the New Kingdom abandoned the whole idea. Instead they cut hidden tombs into a remote valley behind the cliffs of the west bank at Thebes, with nothing on the surface to mark them, and let the natural peak of al-Qurn, which happens to be shaped like a pyramid, stand over the necropolis as a kind of shared monument. Secrecy was the strategy; the workforce that cut and painted the tombs lived in the walled village of Deir el-Medina over the ridge, close enough to walk to work and, in theory, contained enough to keep the locations quiet. The move also concentrated everything: for close to five centuries, from Thutmose I to Ramesses XI, almost every king of Egypt was buried within this one fold of desert.

It mostly failed. Nearly every tomb in the valley was looted in antiquity, some within a generation or two of the burial. But the robbers wanted metal and oils, not paint, and the dry desert dark preserved the walls. What survived is some of the finest painting the ancient world ever produced: royal tombs decorated floor to ceiling with the great funerary compositions, the sun god's voyage through the hours of the night, gates and guardians, stars and judgement scenes, all of it painted for an audience of one dead king and never meant to be seen again.

The tombs follow a recognisable architecture. A doorway in the hillside leads to a sequence of descending corridors, sometimes interrupted by a deep well shaft, opening into pillared halls and finally the burial chamber where the sarcophagus lay. Early tombs bend and hide; later ones run straight and grand. The valley holds pharaohs from Thutmose I to Ramesses XI, along with a few favoured nobles and family members, and the tombs are numbered in order of discovery, KV1 through KV64, which is why every tomb you hear about carries a KV number.

Two discoveries dominate the valley's modern fame. The first is KV62, the tomb of Tutankhamun, found by Howard Carter in 1922, the only royal tomb here ever recovered largely intact. The gold now sits in the Grand Egyptian Museum outside Cairo, but the king himself remains: his mummy rests inside, which is a large part of why the smallest and plainest royal tomb in the valley still draws a queue. The second is KV17, the tomb of Seti I, the longest in the valley at around 137 metres and the most exquisitely decorated, its reliefs and painted ceilings barely faded. It carries the priciest extra ticket by a wide margin and, for many visitors, justifies every pound of it.

One more thing shapes your visit: conservation. Breath humidity and foot traffic damage the pigments, so only a rotating handful of tombs is open on any given day, letting the most fragile walls rest and recover. This is why nobody can promise you a specific tomb in advance, and why the star tombs sit behind their own turnstiles.

What to see: choosing your tombs

Everything starts at the visitor centre, where you buy the standard ticket, any extra tomb tickets and the photo permit; there are no ticket sellers up at the tombs themselves. From there the little electric train, the taftaf, covers the last stretch to the tomb clusters, a short ride that earns its small fare in the heat.

Then it is strategy. From the standard rotation, these are the reliable picks:

• Ramesses III (KV11) and Ramesses IX (KV6): colourful, spacious and beginner-friendly, with wide corridors and legible scenes. Either makes a perfect first tomb.
• Merenptah (KV8): a long, steep descent to a huge burial chamber, usually quieter than the famous names.
• Thutmose III (KV34), when open: reached by a staircase up a cliff cleft, with a burial chamber painted in a spare, almost diagrammatic style unlike anything else in the valley.

Among the extra-ticket tombs, Ramesses V/VI (KV9) is the outstanding value: a modest add-on for one of the greatest ceilings in Egypt, the sky goddess Nut swallowing the evening sun and giving birth to it at dawn, running the full length of the tomb in deep blue and gold. Seti I is the connoisseur's splurge if the budget stretches. Tutankhamun is small and plain after the others, and worth it mainly if standing in the actual tomb, near the actual king, matters to you.

A good first-visit rule: take your three standard tombs, add Seti I or Ramesses VI for the wow factor, and add Tutankhamun only if the name matters.

As for what first-timers miss: look up, because the best painting is often overhead; pause between tombs rather than marching through three in an hour, since the interiors get warm and close; and walk a few minutes beyond the busy central cluster, where the crowds vanish and you hear how silent the valley actually is. Over the ridge, and easy to add to the same morning, the Valley of the Queens holds the tomb of Nefertari, on a separate premium timed ticket and often called the most beautiful painted tomb in all of Egypt. Cut for the favourite wife of Ramesses II around 1255 BC and rediscovered in 1904, it was restored over years of painstaking work and reopened under tight controls: visitor numbers are capped, time inside is strictly limited, and it closes for conservation with little notice, so confirm it is open before you plan the morning around it.

Getting there

The valley is on Luxor's west bank, about a 20-minute drive from the town centre once you are across the river, and the crossing is half the fun. The cheap public ferry shuttles from central Luxor every 10 to 15 minutes; on the far side you pick up a taxi for the last stretch inland to the visitor centre. The alternative is a single taxi door to door over the Luxor Bridge, simplest but slower than it looks on the map, since the bridge sits south of town and the drive loops around: think 30 to 45 minutes.

Most visitors skip the juggling entirely and come on an organised west bank tour that pairs the valley with the temple of Hatshepsut and the Colossi of Memnon, which is the natural circuit: the three sites sit within a few kilometres of each other and share the same early-morning window before the heat. If you have a full day rather than a morning, the necropolis holds more within easy reach: Deir el-Medina, the village of the workers who actually cut and painted the royal tombs, and Medinet Habu, the colour-rich mortuary temple of Ramesses III, both far quieter than anything on the standard circuit. For the full spectacle, sunrise hot-air balloon flights drift over the whole necropolis at dawn, and landing from one then heading straight to the tombs is the classic west bank double.

Best time of day

Be there when the gates open at 6am. This is the single most important decision you will make about the valley. It is a natural sun-trap with almost no shade, and by mid-morning it bakes; at the same time the cruise-ship groups arrive in waves, because Luxor mornings run to the cruise excursion timetable, and the popular tombs turn hot, humid and shoulder to shoulder. At opening you get cool air, soft light on the cliffs, and painted corridors you may have entirely to yourself, which turns sightseeing into something closer to time travel.

The rush arrives mid-morning and hangs around into early afternoon, so if you are already inside the first tomb by 7am you stay a step ahead of it for the rest of the visit. Late afternoon is the quieter second-best if a dawn start fails you, with the groups gone and the light warming the cliffs again. The middle of the day is for the brave and the well-hatted, and the tombs themselves are at their stuffiest then.

Tips for your visit

• Wear closed shoes and carry water. The tombs mean steep ramps and uneven ground, and the valley floor is an oven by 10am.
• Bring a bank card. Luxor's major sites are largely cashless, and everything must be bought at the visitor centre before you head up.
• Sort everything at the visitor centre before boarding the taftaf: tickets, add-ons, the photo permit and your water. There is nothing to buy up at the tombs.
• Check the day's open-tomb list before you commit. The rotation changes, so if one specific tomb is the reason you are coming, confirm it is open first.
• Flash is banned in every tomb, no exceptions, because it damages the pigments. Camera and permit rules shift back and forth, so confirm the current policy at the ticket window.
• If you hire a guide, know the format: guides are not allowed to lecture inside the tombs, so they brief you at each entrance and you explore alone. It is still the best money you will spend here.
• Budget two to three hours for a focused visit, or a half-day to take the valley at leisure.
• Spending several days in Luxor? Run the numbers on the Luxor Pass: the standard version covers most east and west bank sites but not Seti I or Nefertari, while the premium version adds exactly those two, and both are valid for five days.
• Pair the valley with the temple of Hatshepsut and the Colossi of Memnon for the classic half-day, and add the Valley of the Queens if Nefertari is open.